Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi, this is Aaron Kassover from AgentMethods. I talk to a lot of you about getting your
site to search to show up in search engines better. So I want to take a few minutes today
to talk about some ways you can do some research to see if a phrase is worth targeting. There’s
no point in optimizing for a phrase if, first off, it doesn’t get any traffic because
then you’ll do a bunch of work and you won’t see a benefit; or second, if it’s too competitive
because then you do a bunch of work and you won’t see a benefit. So I thought I’d
show you some really simple ways to estimate search volume for a phrase. And we’ll look
at the second part which is competition for a phrase later.
I like to use Google’s keyword tool which is a free tool Google provides. It is designed
for paid search campaigns, but it’s also really handy for estimating organic search
traffic. So the way you use the tool is you go to Google and just type in the phrase “keyword
tool” in the Google search box. It’s the first result that shows up. Click on the tool
to load it, and then you type in the phrase that you’re interested in. There’s a small
caption you type in just to show that you’re a human, and then click on ‘Search.’
The results you see by default are what’s called broad match, which are the number of
search results that contain the phrase, really in any order. So this number is often a lot
bigger than what people are really searching for. What you want is ‘exact match’ and
so you’ll see you can filter to show just ‘exact match,’ which shows you all the
searches for exactly this phrase. So make the change and the results will automatically
refresh so you can see how many searches happen for that exact phrase. So look under the monthly
searches to see the average monthly searches in the United States for your phrase. This
is the local column. The other column shows you global in all languages which really isn’t
all that relevant. So here, you have a really quick way to get
the searches for a phrase. Keep in mind this is Google data only – it’s a good estimate
still. If you’re targeting search engines like Bing or Yahoo you can still use Google
data to show you one phrase versus another to decide which one you should focus on. As
I mentioned before, we should also look at competition. How many other sites are optimizing
for a phrase is important to keep in mind. But we’ll deal with that later. So for now,
when you’re thinking about targeting a search engine phrase, this is how you can go. Use
the Google keyword tool and get an idea on how many searches there are for it.
So that’s it for today. I’ll see you again soon.